Miss Daniela Ciani and her husband, Mr. Alessandro Tessi, lost their daughter during the autumn of 2008. It has been a tough experience for them. While Daniela has always had a lot of relatives in her life, Alessandro has a small family, or at least he only knew a small part of his family.

As a consequence of their loss they both decided to start their own family tree, becoming MyHeritage users in November 2008. Soon after that, MyHeritage found smart matches between their tree and another Tessi's family tree in Australia. To his surprise Alessandro found a cousin of his in a photo, and immediately wrote to him. They had lost contact after the Second World War.

It was the beginning of the construction of a great family tree, which now has about 150 members from Australia, Hungary, Germany, Canada, and of course Italy.

Through MyHeritage Daniela and Alessandro also found out that
some of their relatives had returned to Italy after a long period and that they were living in Tuscany, only a few kilometers away from them, without either of them knowing it.

It's a fantastic story of how Daniela and Alessandro's, with the help of MyHeritage, reunited a family. But this is only the beginning. Once
they found all those relatives, many of which had never met each other, they decided to organize a family meeting, and started planning it with the help of all the members of the family, through MyHeritage.

Finally last May, about 150 people met in Monteriggioni, in Tuscany, close to the village where Alessandro and Daniela live today. "It has been quite exciting" Daniela told us, "to meet people that you already know through Internet, and know are related to you through blood, but who you have never met before in real life."

Family members all wore medieval costumes in order to enforce the meaning of the past meeting the present. Cianis and Tessis, and all the other families involved, will continue to stay in touch thanks to MyHeritage, and who knows where they will have their next family reunion or in what costume.

Thanks to Daniela and Alessandro, and to all their family for sharing this story with us. What's your story?